SQL Server 2005 Metadata

Hidden in the depths of Microsoft’s useful download division in Redmond is a handy pair of utilities you may have discovered that analyse dependencies within and across SSIS and Analysis Services. The first tool, Dependency Analyzer, examines the meta data contained within SSIS packages and Analysis Services objects collating their inter-dependencies writing the results to a pre-defined database structure.

The second tool is the Dependency Viewer and provides a graphical interface displaying relationships between the analysed objects .

The amount of data is considerable and has some quite powerful possibilities. There has been a distinct gap in the MS BI product set, dependency and data analysis being two key areas that their competitors eulogise in large amounts about. This appears to be the beginning of some gap plugging before the release of Katmai (SQL Server 2007). In the meantime all the source code, examples and even some reporting interfaces are provided in the download.

I’m quite looking forward to plugging this tool into some of my end to end 2005 projects and looking at the results. Once I've got some good examples of how everything integrates together on this I'll post ome of the results.